


Call Across Rooms

by levendis



Series: Prompt Fics [33]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Manpain, Memory Loss, No Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-05 09:17:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5369951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s lost more than anyone ever should, isn’t he owed just this one memory back? (Pre-"Face the Raven"; any similarity to "Hell Bent" is purely coincidental.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call Across Rooms

**Author's Note:**

> for anon, who requested: the Doctor recovers the memories from his early life (that the time lords took away bc they're dicks). He remembers his wife (that is one of Clara's echoes) and their kids. The problem is he can't tell her because then she could start remembering that too and she could die since the memories of a time lord inside a human's mind would be too much.

Gallifrey had taken his name when he’d left, as they had with all renegades. He had no House, no provenance, his memory stripped clean of anything tying him to his home. To his family. Susan had never understood, had never noticed the blankness in his eyes when he looked at her, the polite but distant psychic connection. Or if she had, she’d never let that stop her.  
  
A granddaughter, apparently. A House, or so they said, which anyway he couldn’t return to. Some sort of debt he was meant to repay. A fear, but a fear of what? And guilt of what? Running from whom, towards which future? He can’t say for sure whether he’d ever known. He leaves Susan behind, and he says he’ll come back because he supposes that’s the thing to say, and it doesn’t feel as momentous as it might.  
  
(The grief finds him later, the regret; and he learns that, much like a name, family is something you create, something you work at and invest in. It’s a fact he’ll have to keep relearning again and again, and loss will continue to blindside him, and that’s what happens when there’s holes in your memory.)

 

* * *

  
Clara knows she’s been other people, albeit vaguely, fuzzily, the way you remember having dreamt of foreign places. She knows she’s met him before. And sometimes, when the veil is thin and he’s caught off-guard, sleepy mornings or exploding corridors or just a particular smell, a whiff of her perfume, he remembers meeting her. Another her, another him. Other worlds that had existed before this one.  
  
Doesn’t seem like something he should only accidentally, occasionally recall. She is Clara, after all. She leaves an impression. But life is long and things happen so much and there’s holes, there’s holes in his head. Probably best not to know just how much he’s forgotten. Probably best not to poke at the wound. He knows who he is now. He has a name he climbed into, a name he strives to be worthy of; he has a here, a now. He shouldn’t tempt fate.  
  
Except he’s the Doctor, and of course he’s going to tempt fate. The echo in his hearts when she looks at him, the ghost of what they’d been, that niggling feeling in the back of his head: he chases it down, pins it to the wall. He’s lost more than anyone ever should, isn’t he owed just this one memory back?  
  
Owed or not, he has it. He wishes he didn’t have it.

 

* * *

  
She sleeps so much he was initially alarmed, before he relearned the normal requirements of the average human. He sleeps more than he lets on, but it’s still a fairly minimal part of his week. They don’t line up here the way they do other places. She wants him in her bed, she wants to wake up to find him there. Sometimes he sneaks off, accomplishes a few dozen feats of temporal engineering or practices the riff from “Crazy Train” or reads a book, writes a book, whatever. Sometimes he just lies there and watches her.  
  
He’s watching her now. He feels like a bastard all over again. That old sinking feeling.  
  
“We met when I was just out of school,” he whispers. “You thought I was funny. I thought you were the best thing I’d ever seen. Not much has changed, I guess.”  
  
Clara mutters, rolls over. He waits with his breath held until he’s certain she’s not awake.  
  
“I thought love was just something that happened to you. Didn’t realize yet how hard it really is. I wasn’t-” He’s not crying. Why should he be crying? “I wasn’t the best husband. Not by a long shot. And you left, which was the right decision. I would have left me too.” He carefully slides closer to her, puts his arm over her waist, face against her back. “I like to think I’m a better man now. Maybe it’s enough to know I need to try to be. Who knows.”  
  
“Are you talking to me while I’m sleeping again?” Clara, half-awake, already falling back into whatever dream as she turns around, nestles her head beneath his chin.  
  
“Just working through a physics problem. Trying to keep myself occupied. You know how I am.”  
  
She responds with an undignified snore. How can someone so small sound so much like a foghorn? And he takes that, plus the little accompanying nose-whistle, and he reaches back through the holes in his head, where things go to get lost, and he puts them in the place where the other memory used to be. Emerges with the sense that he’s forgotten something important, but not so important he couldn’t live without that particular knowledge.  
  
She’s snoring. Like a great primordial beast. He almost nudges her to stop, then thinks better of it. It’s better than what had been there before. The thing he doesn’t know anymore, whatever that was. He pulls away, leaves the bed as quietly as he can, and spares another minute to watch her, chest rising and falling, lit by the dim glow from the corridor, before closing the door behind him.


End file.
